When number portability was first introduced in the U.S., many fought against
geographical portability because they believed that consumers would reject the idea
because they would no longer be able to tell the origin of a call.
How ironic that in the world of the Internet, the creators sought to maintain the
personal touch. They recognized that memorizing yet another set of numbers would
not work for the Internet. Using IP addresses for the routing of e-mail would be far too
much for consumers and therefore they would not use the service.
Certainly the Internet (and all its underlying technology) ultimately relies on a set
of numbers for addressing. For this reason another form of identity was developed, and
the function of resolving these identities to an IP address left to the network.
Hence was born the present form of the e-mail address, or the Universal Resource
Identifier (URI). The subscriber, of course, has complete control over their e-mail addresses,
but the portion behind the ???@??? symbol is reserved for use by the service provider.
Not only can you identify the subscriber, you can also identify the service provider
providing services to that subscriber.
The URI still has to be changed to a number format for use within the Internet, and
this is true for the IMS as well. We won??™t go into the specifics of how that is done here,
as this is discussed in more detail in later chapters.
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